Solo Performances
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Come for the crip ingenuity; stay for the smooth feels of what it is to be each other’s everything.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Come for the crip ingenuity; stay for the smooth feels of what it is to be each other’s everything.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
A conversation of intergenerational trans-resistance and anti-racist fierceness between two of the most inspiring public speakers we know.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
Experience a sense of being in the world, in a specific space and time. Including Jeanne Liotta’s recordings of the ionosphere and Walter Ruttmann’s radical 35mm precursor to musique concrète.
A changing pool of people (40 or so at a time – artists, audiences, etc) talk for 90 minutes in a simultaneous series of open-ended round-table discussions, structured like speed dating, and mixed live as both a concert and for radio broadcast.
A panel exploring the poetics of abolition. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change.”
A short chat about what we (Arika) might be trying to do with our program for the Biennial.
Noise music for the eyes: projectors turned into instruments, B&W film loops into a thrumming riot of colour, motion and sound.
These simple, one-take videos, relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East via the most basic of means (a hotel room, a camcorder, John’s personal thoughts, concerns and convictions).
Imagery, drawn from what seems like hundreds of different films is overlaid and combined in a promissory rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows.